“I think it is time.” My voice wavered as I said those words to my husband over the phone.

I was home alone when Rowan, our beloved old dog, stopped breathing. I had been sitting with him stroking his warm body. He’d had some particularly difficult days in a long autumn of increasingly hard days. We worried that he was coming to the end of his life. But we didn’t know when or what might take him. He’d been so tough and brave in recent weeks, fighting through canine dementia and other ailments with a tenacious determination to stay with his people. He was growing tired.

I touched him, he drew a breath. And then he didn’t. For several moments. After what seemed forever, his chest moved again — softly, slowly, faintly. Then, it happened a second time, and a third. My heart caught in my throat.

The time had come. I knew it.

We took him to the vet the next day, for that gentle end. In her office, on a rug laid on the floor for sad purpose, we surrounded him and held him. The last thing he did was cover my face with dog kisses, looking at me with his always-hopeful sparkling dark eyes. And then, sleep and silence.

As I held his still body, I knew he’d reached his end. It was, at the same moment, a thundering loss and a tender completion. This was the both-and of love, where grief and some inexplicable grace commingle.

Rowan’s time was fulfilled.

Advent is an invitation to consider time — with its endings and beginnings. Indeed, on the Sunday after Christmas, the lectionary offers these startling words summing up the season: “But when the fullness of time had come. . .”

How do we know the fullness of time? How do any of us know when to utter words ultimately unfathomable: “It is time”?

The fullness of time involves completion and culmination, the running of our course. Something ends that something else might begin. The texts read for today point toward the end of the times we know — times of injustice and violence — and the times to come — times of equity and peace. The crooked ways of this world, with its suffering and death, will be made straight. The arrival of the Lord is near. The course of this age is coming to its end. The wolf and the lamb will live together. Peace holds sway over the whole of creation. The long-promised Kingdom of God is at hand.

Is it time? Now?

I’ve been theologically time-curious my entire Christian life. When I was a little girl in the Methodist church, I wanted to fast-forward the year to my favorite holidays. Is it time yet, Mommy? For Easter? For Christmas?

As a teenager, newly converted to being a Bible church evangelical, I became time-obsessed with prophecy. Is the end of the world near? When will the Rapture occur? Is the Battle of Armageddon at hand? My church watched the prophetic calendar unceasingly — day after day, year after year — in a sort of biblical countdown of time fulfilled and the arrival of the Kingdom of God.

Both the Methodists and the Bible church evangelicals taught me that Christians care about time — and that we care about it in relation to God’s promises and dreams to and for humankind. Time matters. Yet they taught me about time differently.

My evangelical friends understood time as a line. Event A led to B and to C, and to so on. Eventually, human time would arrive at X, Y, and Z. Beginning, middle, and end. They believed the Bible recorded this sacred chronology in its pages, and it was up to us to understand its unfolding.

After a few years, and despite being initially captivated by this vision of time, I came to see it as a bit of a theological fool’s errand.

It had been hard to grasp as a child, but the Methodists introduced me to cyclical time, a different understanding of time that eventually made spiritual and theological sense. Unlike the charts of arrowed time festooning the Bible Church, Methodists had no such linear maps. Instead we had things like Advent wreaths and Lenten fasts to mark the unfolding of time. Oddly enough, time repeated itself in liturgies and holy days. Easter came every year. So did Christmas.

Years might move “forward” in time, but each year they reenacted stories, memories, and rituals in cycles of memory and habits of practice. Over decades, over generations, over the long traditions of faith — over and over — repeating, connecting, reweaving, deepening.

John the Baptist said that the “way” would be made straight, not the time! Even while proclaiming the Kingdom, time remained poetically elusive. It reached both backward and forward, it overlapped and was overlaid.

Of course, the Methodists had clocks and calendars like everyone else. But it slowly dawned on me that biblical time was less like an Advent calendar of countdown and more like an Advent wreath of verdant reprise. Not so much ticking off the days toward an event as a spiral of anticipatory wisdom. We live in what is not yet.

Perhaps the “fullness of time” is less of a line and more a nimbus, a halo. Somehow time and light meet — in the stars, through the cosmos in the words of the Gospel of John, visible in candles of the wreath, and palpable on a rug on the floor at the veterinarian’s office as life fades into death with a brilliant last blaze of love.

Unless you are a physicist, you probably can’t explain time and light. You just know when the time has come — and you see differently, you experience a flash of recognition, a moment of enlightenment as it were. The fullness of time doesn’t break upon us as much as it cracks us open. It doesn’t bring worlds down from the heavens; rather, it brings forth wells of compassion from deep within. Time spirals within and around, lighting our way toward compassion and peace, filling the universe with love and justice. And creative joy.

There are no calendars for that.

I have no idea when — or if — the Kingdom of God shall be manifest in earthly glory. I don’t know if the end is at hand and a new heaven and earth beckon. I do, however, know it is near. It is coming and it is always here, ready to reveal itself, ready for us to live its light..

Over the decades, I’ve learned to trust when the time is coming or has come. I understand when time is ripening. And I certainly experience times of culmination, completion, or fulfillment. This is the very meaning of discernment, of awakening.

Advent sharpens this sense of time, alerting our intuitions to the fullness of time. Perhaps that’s why John wants us to “repent.” To let go of all those things that interfere with the circles and spirals and cosmic wonders of time — to enter into nonlinear apprehension and let our hearts grow toward a more profound awareness of endings and new beginnings. And to prepare ourselves for all the mysterious ways in which the fullness of time presses into our lives.

On the human side of this mystery, grief frequently accompanies endings. It is a strange irony that sadness often follows completion and fulfillment. Many of us fear beginnings as well, apprehensive of what is being born.

The fullness of time is not easy to embrace. We may long for it, but the truth is that when it arrives it can overwhelm us in sorrow as it moves our hearts in directions not yet known.
The prophet Isaiah said that children and animals are the best guides toward the Kingdom. Time is more fluid for them; newness is welcomed not dreaded.

And that’s what I’m contemplating today. The mystery at Rowan’s end. Of the last dog kisses and the final breath. Of knowing that one reality has passed into another, that a treasured companion has moved into memory. Imagining him running free off the leash into that unknown country, perhaps glimpsing back to see if we’d follow. But we can’t. It isn’t our time. His completion — the fullness of his life — leaves a frightening emptiness in ours. Death and life, life and death.

And yet — that’s where faith flickers most brightly. We might experience the fullness of time as the starkest of endings. But the fullness of time also opens to a world new born. Peace on earth; goodwill to all. God with us.

So, no matter the sadness, faith lights candles in the dark, marking the journey along the crooked road of human pain and suffering with beams of luminosity — confident that Isaiah’s vision is at hand. All creatures living, playing, and prospering together in safety and joy. Life redeemed. Faith holds fast to the promise that “in his time shall the righteous flourish; there shall be abundance of peace till the moon shall be no more.”

The peaceable kingdom awaits us — and is with us — in sacred time, the sort of time with and in the heartbeat of God. Even when our own hearts catch a beat; even when we feel we might break. Every ending reminds us that time winds toward this glorious culmination, when re-creation enfolds all loss, pain, and death in the totality of love.

This mystery is ever-present. It is always deep within, and it hovers just beyond the horizon. That place where all promises are kept, hopes realized, and love dwells in the fullness of time. The time is near. And it is far off. The time is coming. And it is time.